ROME, Jan 11 (AP): Cardinal George Pell, a onetime financial adviser to Pope Francis who spent 404 days in solitary confinement in his native Australia before his child sex abuse convictions were overturned, has died at age 81.
He was a divisive figure. He lived to see Vatican rivals charged with financial crimes after he worked to reform the Holy See’s finances. In Australia, he was a lightning rod for disagreements over whether the Catholic Church had been properly held to account for historic child sex abuse.
Pell died on Tuesday in Rome, where he had attended the funeral last week of Pope Benedict XVI. Pell suffered fatal heart complications following hip surgery, said Archbishop Peter Comensoli, Pell’s successor as archbishop of Melbourne.
Related Posts:
Sydney Catholic Archbishop Anthony Fisher told reporters the death had come as a shock.
“It will be for historians to assess his impact on the life of the church in Australia and beyond, but it was considerable and will be long lasting,” Fisher said.
“For many people, particularly of the Catholic faith, this will be a difficult day and I express my condolences to all those who are mourning today,” said Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese.
Fisher said a requiem for Pell would be held at St. Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican in the next few days, and in time his body would be brought back to Australia for a funeral Mass and buried in the crypt at St. Mary’s Cathedral in Sydney.
Journalist Lucie Morris-Marr, who wrote the book “Fallen” about Pell’s trial, said on Twitter that Pell’s death “will be terribly triggering for many Australians impacted by Catholic child sexual abuse and not just those involved in his trial.”
Pell, the former archbishop of Melbourne and Sydney, became the third-highest ranked official in the Vatican after Pope Francis tapped him in 2014 to reform the Vatican’s notoriously opaque finances as the Holy See’s first-ever finance czar.
He spent three years as prefect of the newly created Secretariat for the Economy, where he tried to impose international budgeting, accounting and transparency standards.
But Pell returned to Australia in 2017 in an attempt to clear his name of child sex charges dating from his time as archbishop.
A Victoria state County Court jury initially convicted him of molesting two 13-year-old choirboys at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in the latest 1990s shortly after he had become archbishop of Melbourne. Pell served 404 days in solitary confinement before the full-bench of the High Court unanimously overturned his convictions in 2020.
During his time in prison, Pell kept a diary documenting everything from his prayers and Scripture readings to his conversations with visiting chaplains and the prison guards. The journal turned into a triptych, “Prison Journal,” the proceeds of which went to pay his substantial legal bills.
In the diary, Pell reflected on the nature of suffering, Pope Francis’ papacy and the humiliations of solitary confinement as he battled to clear his name for a crime he insisted he never committed.
Pell and his supporters believed he was scapegoated for all the crimes of the Australian Catholic Church’s botched response to clergy sexual abuse. Victims and critics say he epitomized everything wrong with how the church has dealt with the problem.
“Looking back, I was probably excessively optimistic that I’d get bail,” Pell said in a 2021 interview at his home in Rome, crediting his “glass half-full” attitude to his Christian faith.
